Fresh twist in 40-year-old Cold War spy mystery

BIG NAME: Bill Sutch was a former bureaucrat with a high profile and plenty of influence.

UNDER ARREST: Detective Senior Sergeant Colin Lines leads Bill Sutch to a car in the Aro Valley sting, September 1974.

ON THE RUN: Dimitri Razgovorov, a KGB officer, sprints down Aro St in Wellington when he realises Sutch has been arrested.

SPY GUY: Former SIS agent Kit Bennetts, about the time of the raid.

Relevant offers

Forty years after he was acquitted of spying, electrifying new evidence has emerged showing that top government official Bill Sutch was a KGB recruit working under the codename "Maori".

The Dominion Post has obtained copies of official KGB records that show Sutch was a 24-year veteran recruit of the feared Soviet spy agency when he was arrested while meeting a KGB agent at an Aro Valley park, in Wellington, in 1974.

But his daughter says the evidence does not match her father and maintains he was not involved with the Soviets.

Sutch was acquitted of a charge of obtaining information helpful to the enemy, following a sensational five-day trial.

Forty years later, the records provide the KGB's answer to the enduring question from New Zealand's greatest spy scandal: Was Sutch, a brilliant and senior bureaucrat who influenced several prime ministers, a Soviet spy?

Smuggled out of Russia by a KGB defector, the papers also provide coded details of other Kiwis the KGB recruited during the Cold War.

They even reveal the KGB's New Zealand budget, showing that the year Sutch was arrested, their safe held a surplus $2504.64.

The documents don't name Sutch but the details clearly identify him and state he was recruited in 1950.

Given the codename "Maori", the records say Sutch was in contact with a KGB agent, Drozhzhin.

The former SIS agent who caught Sutch in a clandestine meeting with KGB agent Dmitri Razgovorov in Holloway Rd, said the documents vindicated SIS attention on Sutch.

"I'm delighted . . . not because I want to stick it to Bill Sutch, but because I always knew it to be true," former agent Kit Bennetts said. "It is important we don't run from our history, no matter how uncomfortable it might be."

It was regrettable Sutch refused to co-operate when confronted with evidence of his previous meetings with the KGB agent, Bennetts said.

"What we really wanted to know was what he'd done in the past. There was no desire to send him to prison. If he'd co-operated he would have got his knighthood and no-one would be any the wiser."